*By Michael Teich*
Amazon inked a new partnership with American Express, but don't expect the financial industry to be the next area the tech giant jumps into.
"The thing that people misunderstand is that tech companies don't want to manufacture financial products," said Lex Sokolin, Global Director of Fintech Strategy at Autonomous Research. "It's about making the ecosystem and the platform more powerful, and finance is just a feature inside of that."
American Express announced Tuesday it will launch a co-branded Amazon credit card for small businesses. The move accelerates Amazon's foray into financial products and strengthens its position as a lender. The goal, Sokolin said, is to enable small businesses to finance their activities, getting more products on Amazon's platform, and ultimately driving more commerce.
Plus, the opportunity costs of devoting itself to the financial industry are too high.
"Amazon has tremendous high-growth, super interesting, blue oceans to explore,” he said. "They could be investing in building a mortgage business, or they can build artificial intelligence business."
For the full segment, [click here.](https://cheddar.com/videos/amazon-bolsters-financial-prowess-with-new-credit-card)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is taking a 9.2% stake in Twitter to become the social media platform's largest shareholder. Musk purchased approximately 73.5 million shares, according to a regulatory filing Monday.
The relatively robust March jobs report showed that despite the low unemployment rate, Black, Hispanic, and women job seekers are still having difficulty finding work. William M. Rodgers III, the vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis noted that participation rates in the labor force ticked up for minorities, adding to other positive signs of growth. He also spoke to Cheddar News to discuss further the jobs figures, the state of the labor market, and rising inflation.
April Fools’ Day is full of eye-rolling marketing ideas that sometimes make us chuckle, but mostly make us groan. Here’s a roundup of some of the notable products we won’t be seeing on shelves anytime soon.
Amit Bendov, the CEO and co-founder of Gong, a platform utilizing artificial intelligence to help sales and customer support teams, joined Cheddar News to talk about the tech company's innovative use of AI. Bendov pointed to an example of how the platform aided a client in selling point-of-sales software to restaurants. "Gong came up with a recommendation that when they called to introduce yourself to a new company, you should talk about the iPad before the application. That small change increased sales by 12 percent. It's a very simple change," he said. "The funny thing, Gong doesn't even know what an iPad is, what the application [is], or anything about their business. It just observed. But this is what the top 5 percent of people are doing that nobody else does. It's a very simple change to implement. Very hard to detect."
The Week's Top Stories is a guided tour through the biggest market stories of the week, from winning stocks to brutal dips to the facts and forecasts generating buzz on Wall Street.
